Safe Zones For Moderate Fighters

Air strikes mounted by US-led Western and Arab coalition forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which renamed itself the Islamic State (IS), in both Iraq and Syria to degrade and destroy this terrorist organization have been continuing since early June and late September, respectively. Yet NATO-member Turkey, bordering both Syria and Iraq, where IS has occupied large swathes of territory, has not largely made up its mind yet on the nature of its contribution to the coalition.
The Turkish government, instead, continues to place conditions to be part of the coalition, such as the creation of safe zones and no-fly zones inside Syria to host war refugees while insisting that the coalition strategy should also include toppling the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose war against the Syrian opposition, which is now mostly composed of radical jihadist fighters such as the IS, is coming close to four years. The fact that the Turkish government has been putting up roadblocks to joining the coalition has brought into question, among other things, whether Turkey is a real and a loyal member of the NATO alliance.
Turkey has so far agreed to take part in a US-led program to train and equip the Syrian moderate opposition fighters through which they are intended to gain better fighting capabilities to defeat the IS on the ground. However, the reason behind Turkey agreeing, at long last, to join the training and arming program of moderate fighters as part of the anti-IS coalition is its plan of seeing Assad's downfall. But toppling Assad won't be possible through training and equipping the fighters since the brutal Damascus regime is backed by Russia, China and Iran.
The US-led anti-IS coalition's strategy differs from that of Turkey as it seeks to strengthen the fighting capabilities of moderate fighters to help defeat the IS.
Nevertheless, Turkey and the US will soon begin training the moderate fighters most possibly in a gendarmerie training center in Kırşehir in Central Anatolia, though another site close to the Syrian border within Turkey is also being considered. The fighters to be trained will be selected by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). There are allegedly some reservations raised by the US over MİT's selection of fighters due to long held speculations about the spy agency's alleged support of radical fighters.
Turkey and the US alike, in the meantime, do not want the fighters to be equipped with heavy arms as Ankara appears to agree on supplying fighters with guns, including rocket-propelled grenades (RPG). The US has pledged to supply the trained fighters with arms.
On the Turkish request for safe and no-fly zones within Syria, the coalition has not yet warmed to the idea mainly because it will mean a declaration of war against the Assad regime that will highly complicate the coalition's strategy of defeating the IS.
However, the US is understood to have been in favor of the creation of a safe zone or small zones inside Syria close to the Turkish border with the purpose of protecting the fighters escaping from IS assaults.
Yet training and equipping the fighters will take months as the ongoing war against the IS requires other immediate measures to stop its advance in Syria and Iraq. In fact, a predominantly Kurdish city in Syria has been witnessing a fierce fight between IS and Syrian Kurds supported by US-led coalition air strikes while Ankara has come under severe criticism for not going to the help of Syrian Kurds in Kobani, less than two kilometers away from the Turkish-Syrian border.
As training and equipping the fighters will take a long time, the US has been asking the Turkish government to allow earlier use of its bases, including İncirlik in the south of the country and very close to the Syrian border, primarily to put more drones in addition to the existing four US-made Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enable more intelligence support for the coalition's air operations on IS targets as well as mid-air refueling tanker aircraft, among other things.
Using İncirlik is not a primary concern for the US or other coalition forces for offensive purposes as the urgency is for getting a better intelligence picture of the IS on the ground. The time will come, however, for the US to push Turkey to allow İncirlik to be used for fighters to bomb IS targets.
If the Turkish government keeps throwing up roadblocks to joining the coalition, Washington, which probably knows that Ankara made a “deal” with the IS to get Turkish hostages freed in late September, may finally get fed up and leak the details of the deal to the US media, including The Washington Post.
More importantly, the sooner Ankara gets on board the coalition the better it will be, instead of Turkey finding itself in a position to fight against the IS, which has already been posing a direct threat to Turkish security.

LALE KEMAL (Cihan/Today's Zaman)